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Deepwater Horizon, the Hollywood treatment of the disaster, is apparently moving forward, with Mark Wahlberg in talks to star. The script is based on a New York Times story about the final day on the rig.

According to Deadline Hollywood, Wahlberg is vying for the role of “the No. 2 manager on the doomed oil rig.” It’s not clear exactly what that means – the Offshore Installation Manager, the captain, one of the BP company men or perhaps some fictionalized character.

The movie is supposed to show the 48 hours leading up to the disaster. I can’t imagine a Hollywood studio looking for a blockbuster would want to bore audiences with all the arcane discussions about centralizers and cement tests that took place in BP’s Houston offices the day before the disaster. Most of the film will probably focus on the last day on the rig.

The events leading up to the explosion on the final day are indeed compelling, as I found in researching my own book about the disaster. The witness accounts, thanks to the U.S. Coast Guard’s public hearings, are detailed and voluminous, which gives scriptwriters a lot of material to draw from. I was surprised at how precisely all the survivors’ testimony lined up. Typically, eyewitness accounts of disasters are full of conflicts because people under stress tend to overlook or distort details. But in the Deepwater Horizon case, everyone’s story meshes pretty well. That’s the result of the extensive disaster training that the rig’s crew received. That same training helped limit the deaths on board the floating inferno to the 11 men who were killed at the moment of the explosion.

Mark Wahlberg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What worries me about a Hollywood production, though, is that a movie, unlike a nonfiction book or a newspaper story, is first and foremost entertainment. Facts will get changed. “No. 2 managers” will be created.

Unfortunately, this takes away from the more important stories. What makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster an important story is not the compelling drama, but the fact that these were real people whose lives were permanently altered on April 20, 2010. There were true heroes on the rig that day, those who made sure that the injured got out alive. But the story didn’t end when they made it off the rig, or even when they made it back to shore.

The drama of the moment captures the headlines, but the consequences of the disaster linger long after the public’s attention has moved on.

Many of the survivors are still struggling, some with injuries, others with post-traumatic stress disorders and others, especially those who vowed to never work offshore again, with economic issues. The environmental impacts, too, are still being assessed. This the bigger story that needs to be remember amid the flash and fury of a big-screen production.

Children are growing up without fathers, injuries are preventing some of the survivors from working. While Gulf Coast businesses clamor to collect millions for their losses, maritime law prevents the victims and their families from collecting damages. BP continues to squabble over commercial claims related to the 87-day oil spill that followed the Deepwater Horizon’s destruction even as some of those survivors still await their own day in court.

All of this suffering could have been avoided if a company that had a decade of warning signs – some of them fatal -- had bothered to heed them. That speaks to the broader, more mundane issue of profit-driven corporate cultures and how they address safety issues.

It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood production delving into these issues. The movie may end with the crew making it aboard the supply boat watching the rig burn – the main characters are safe, cut the traditional Hollywood ending.

Ultimately, it isn’t a disaster story or even a survivor tale, but a story of tragedy and triumph, of human failing and accomplishment, that underscores the price we as a society are willing to pay in our never-ending quest for cheap and abundant energy.